Dark Current — Electric Utility / Domestic Extremism Edition

Digital Download

Game Creator: Philippe Borremans / RiskComms FZCO

Estimated Time to Play: 90–120 minutes

Number of Players: 5–8 players plus a facilitator

Roles (7):

VP, Corporate Communications, General Counsel, Chief Security Officer, Grid Operations Director, Government & Regulatory Affairs Lead, CEO (optional), Customer Experience Lead (optional)

Game Description:

Dark Current is a tabletop crisis simulation built around a coordinated physical attack on three regional substations — and the federal investigation that legally constrains the utility from explaining what happened, even as a domestic extremist network claims credit online and a sitting Senator calls for a federal military deployment. The company isn't racing to catch up with facts it doesn't have. It knows exactly what happened. What it doesn't have is permission to say it. Every round, players face the same structural choice: stay inside what Legal has cleared and let the public narrative fill the silence, or step outside it and pay for accuracy the same price as a lie.

Features:

•      The constraint itself as the core mechanic — the Disclosure Boundary is a literal, tracked card of pre-approved statements that starts the session with exactly three lines; expanding it requires a dice-rolled Legal Clearance request that can be denied, and any statement outside the boundary costs trust whether it's true or not.

•      Legal counsel as a structural gatekeeper, not a villain — General Counsel holds sole authority over what can be said and one free unexplained refusal per session, deliberately creating a target for player frustration that the debrief is built to unpack.

•      A communication clock wearing an engineering name — the Blackout Clock tracks how long the company can hold public credibility, explicitly distinct from the 72-hour physical grid capacity running in the background.

•      Political escalation running in parallel — a Senator's public call for military deployment and a DOJ investigation intensify independently of the table's choices, capable of cutting off the company's voice entirely if a late-session federal request is accepted.

•      Facilitator-driven escalation — a 10-round, 40-hour clock moving from the narrowest possible disclosure boundary, through symbolic consistency, to a reckoning where any contradiction gets read as evidence.

•      Four distinct endgame states — Controlled Disclosure, Narrative Lock-In, Forced Blackout, or Federal Silence Order — with no outcome in which every objective is achieved.

•      Scalable — runs with 5 players doubling up on roles or a full 7-person table; the VP, Corporate Communications role should never be cut.

Game requires 1d6 and 1d10 (not included with digital download; free online dice rollers work).

Publisher: EM Disaster Gaming